UPDATED: Thompson pulls out of race. No one will notice.

Are you familiar with afternoon traffic on the McAlister Freeway? You and thousands of other drivers are stuck, as their cars inch their way north out of downtown. They crawl past Brackenridge Park. You shift glacially through the Olmos Basin.

And when you get past the airport, you find no blockage, no repair work, no stalled cars and no reason for traffic to slow down.

Politics is a lot like that. It gets bogged down in mutually-assured destruction via fax; negative campaigning; and a desire to focus on non-issues. And when you can finally sort everything out, you have no idea how or why any of that came up. Or even why you were heading north.

In the same vein, Fred Thompson — the non-existent candidate — is no longer pretending to be in the race. The long, national illusion has finally come to an end. I don’t know what Fred stood for, but that’s okay — neither did he.

Too lazy to run, too lazy to quit

Thompson finally pulled out of a presidential race he never wanted to be in. The saga of Thompson’s non-candidacy is an example of how blog- and media-fueled hype can pump air into the most ridiculous of concepts. Thompson was a un-factor before he became a non-factor.

Martin Luther King Day reminded us that we’re all brothers and sisters. And in that spirit, Democratic front runners Sens. Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton fought like siblings in a CNN-sponsored debate Monday night. They’re killing each other. But woe to the GOP candidate who attacks any Democrat — like every family you know, the candidates will stop their bickering long enough to beat that Republican like a circus monkey.

(Insert your own “hot air from Austin” joke here)

For the third year in a row, Texas leads the nation in wind-power electricity added to the national power grid. The Lone Star State cranks 1,618 megawatts annually from the wind.